‘They shot my mother, she fights on through me’

‘When I was growing up, our house was full of people who came to her because she would listen and she would help. Even though she was threatened and jailed, that didn’t stop her from campaigning. She believed people had a right to democracy and as a wife of the symbol she was bound to speak up’

On the eve of a film about how she lost both parents in Nigeria’s political turmoil, Hafsat Abiola-Costello tells Margarette Driscoll why she is battling to help women in her homeland.

By the time she was 23, Hafsat Abiola-Costello had lost both her parents to political violence in Nigeria. Her mother, Kudirat Abiola, was shot in 1996, the day before she was due to fly out to Hafsat’s graduation in America. Two years later Hafsat’s father, Moshood Abiola, died in the prison.

Moshood, a businessman, had won the country’s first democratic election in 1993 but was prevented by the military government from assuming power. Officially, he died of a heart attack but his family never believed it: he collapsed after drinking tea that may have been poisoned. “My father loved people and had faith in people. My mother, too,” says Hafsat.

“She was just the nicest person. She was married to this wealthy, powerful man but she loved her family and she was raised in a culture of sharing, so his wealth was only useful in so far as you could use it to help others…

“When I was growing up, our house was full of people who came to her because she would listen and she would help. Even though she was threatened and jailed, that didn’t stop her from campaigning, she believed people had a right to democracy and as a wife of the symbol she was bound to speak up.”

Nearly 20 years on, Hafsat has taken up her parents’ mantle and is running a campaign to educate and empower women in Nigeria. She is also a member of the Ogun State cabinet, responsible for the fulfilment of millennium goals in education and development in the area. Moving back to Nigeria, four years ago was one of the hardest decision that she has ever had to make as it entailed leaving her two young children – Khali, 8, and Annabella – 6 in Brussels with their father Nick Costello, a British diplomat.

She visits as often as she can and intends to bring the children to Nigeria for a month over the summer, but for the foreseeable future their family life is stretched across two continents.

“Some friends were so shocked, they thought my priority should be my own kids but I thought: if I’m going to be a public servant, I can’t have this traditional mindset,” she says.

“I can only do what I’m doing because I have the nicest husband. When I’m coming back, he starts counting down the days with the children and explaining how long I’ll be around, so they feel ‘Mummy’s around and she’s going to read us bedtime stories and help with dinner.’ Nick creates a stable environment in which we can all be happy. A lot of husbands would set up the guilt trip, making me a villain, but he never does, so I feel very lucky.”

Hafsat’s move into politics, her dramatic family history and the story of Nigeria’s fragile pro-democracy movement are chronicled in ‘The Supreme Price’ a film by the American director Joanna Lipper that opens in Britain tomorrow (thesupremeprice.com). It won the prize for best documentary at the Africa International Film Festival and has been shown at other festivals round the world. The New York Times says it “shapes one country’s recent history into an accessible and tragic family drama.”

Even today, with a democratic government in place, Nigeria isn’t safe. The Islamist group- Boko Haram has rampaged through the north of the country abducting girls, most notably the 276 schoolgirls who were seized in April last year. Sexism is still rife- only a tiny minority of politicians are women and even Hafsat’s brother regards it as a step too far to imagine a woman president.

“With every step forward that women take, especially if they take many steps forward, some men may feel threatened so there is a backlash,” says Hafsat. “It’s of no surprise that the girls who were abducted were in school preparing to take an exam to go to university in an area where only four per cent of girls go to university. So it’s a backlash, a sense of being threatened, that some men feel and it’s not rational.”

As for danger, she was afraid when she first visited Nigeria after her parents’ deaths – “I didn’t trust the police or the army” – but she has had to take danger in her stride. “Everybody in Nigeria is in danger in one way or another,” she says.

“If you are ill or have an accident and you have to be rushed to the hospital, your life is in danger because you could… find the medicines have not been restocked or there are no doctors or the doctors are on strike.

“Going to work or having a baby in London is not a dangerous activity but because of the dysfunction, these are dangerous things in Nigeria – simple, normal things put people’s lives at risk. It’s no good sitting at home hoping to be safe, we have to go out and change the system. The country want change, the important thing for me is how we give women a voice in that change.”

She named the campaigning group she has founded, The Kudirat Initiative for Democracy, after her mother. Three years after Kudirat was killed, Hafsat was able to visit Nigeria briefly when the military government gave way to democracy. She slept in her mother’s bedroom surrounded by her things. Nothing had been moved, her mothers clothes still hung in the wardrobe.

It was, not surprisingly, an emotional homecoming. “We should have realised her phone was tapped, that she was being tracked,” says her daughter.

“I decided then that if in killing my mother they were trying to silence her, her voice would live through me. Those were giant shoes to fill but her voice would not be silent one more day.”